Pinning down a pet peeve

Published 4:00 am, Friday, January 27, 1995

MIAMI - Sacrilege! Heresy! Pestilence! On two, ready, break!

The other night - it doesn't matter which one because at the Super Bowl they are all the same, except for the league party on Friday night, when wretched excess is juxtaposed against local squalor - I violated a sacred trust of the sportswriting bidness by trading away my Official Media Pin of Super Bowl XXIX in this the 75th year of Our NFL.

I gave it to a waitress at a restaurant in exchange for her name tag because it seemed like the right thing to do. It's not every day you meet someone named Scylla, pronounced scylla. Besides, I had another media pin stashed away in the detritus of my hotel room.

In another variation of the old there's two kinds of people in the world (those who believe there are two kinds of people in the world and those who do not), there are two kinds of people at major sporting events:

Pin geeks and non-pin geeks.

I'm a non-pin geek.

Many otherwise decent people turn into slavering pin geeks at the slightest promise of some tiny scrap of metal imprinted with somebody's logo. As if they need this fool's bauble to justify their suddenly empty lives or somehow fill a yawning void in their existence.